Chrome will start to pause Flash animation on websites by default that are peripheral to the main page in September.

Chrome has been working with Adobe to lower energy consumption on devices so they added a new setting that will automatically pause plugin content that is “peripheral to the main page” to save battery power for laptops and devices. At the moment, this setting is set to “Run all plugin content (recommended)” by default – but that will change in September of this year.

I changed my settings on Chrome to see what Yahoos front page would look like by default in December. You can see the area where the billboard should be playing grayed out on the left with a play button in the middle. After I pressed the “play” button, the ad didn’t play but instead displayed the final frame of the flash animation and there was no way to interact with the rich media part of the ad unit – the click through was the only working part of the ad unit.